Matt Ridley responds to Tim Lambert’s War @ Deltoid

Since it has been mostly silent in the last few months, I didn’t even know Deltoid blog was still up and running, but I’m happy to publish this rebuttal for Matt Ridley against Tim Lambert’s claim that Ridley was wrong 20 years ago in a piece Mr. Lambert has focused on. Mr. Lambert can hopefully learn a few things by reading this, mostly, that he’s out of his league when arguing with Matt Ridley, who’s far more versed in the subject than Lambert. I suppose the word “pwned” might apply here. – Anthony

Nostradamus has nothing on me…

Guest post by Matt Ridley

I first wrote about man-made climate change more than quarter of a century ago in 1986, when I was science editor of The Economist. Here’s what I wrote then:

“If man were not around, the planet would, over several centuries, cool down enough for snow to last through the summer in Europe and much of North America. That snow would accumulate until ice sheets covered the land. The next ice age would have begun.

But man is around, and he has fiddled with the thermostat. In particular, he has burned wood, coal, gas and oil in increasing amounts, turning it into carbon dioxide and steam in the process. At the same time he has cut down forests to make way for agriculture. More carbon dioxide, fewer plants to turn it back into oxygen: as a result carbon-dioxide levels are rising steadily. They have now reached 150% of their pre-industrial levels: about 280 billion tonnes of carbon have been added to the atmosphere.

All this extra carbon dioxide makes the atmosphere slightly less transparent to infra-red rays. More of the earth’s reflected heat stays here rather than escaping to space.so, the planet is getting warmer. Slowly, and erratically (for about 30 years after the second world war the climate cooled slightly), the average temperature of the whole globe is going up. It has risen about ½ degC since 1850. Carbon dioxide takes time to show its effects, though, so even if levels stay the same as they are now, the temperature will continue to climb. If they go on rising, in the next century the temperature will rise by several degrees.

That may not sound much. To the inhabitants of cold countries, it might sound attractive. But it is worrying mainly because of its effect on the oceans and the pattern of climate. If the temperature of the oceans rises, the water expands slightly and the ice caps melt slightly: on present trends, the sea level will rise by between two and ten feet by 2100. That will inundate low-lying parts of the world, including such populous places as Bangladesh and Holland.”

I think you will agree that this is a fairly standard account of the greenhouse effect and – apart from the male pronoun for the species – could have been written today. Very little has changed in the conventional account of global warming. Indeed, today I would change almost none of it. (Almost! Read on.) I am moderately relieved to find that with just a few weeks exposure to the science of global warming I got most of it roughly right. In those days, remember, there was no internet and journalists had to find things out the hard way.

But as the years passed I came to understand more, and soon I no longer accepted every word of the above account. In particular, I discovered something my informants had failed to disclose – that even fast rising levels of carbon dioxide could not on their own generate “several degrees” of warming in a century: for that to happen requires amplification by water vapour. All the models assumed this amplification, but the evidence for it began to look more and more threadbare. So by 1993, six years after the piece just quoted, I no longer thought that 2-10 feet of sea level rise was likely and I no longer thought that several degrees of warming were likely. Instead, I wrote – in a single throwaway sentence in a long piece about eco-scares generally – that

“Global warming, too, has shot its bolt, now that the scientific consensus has settled down on about a degree of temperature increase over a century-that is, little more than has taken place in the past century.”

This was published in a book the Economist put out each year called (in this case) “The world in 1994”. The main prediction of the essay, by the way, was that genetic engineering was the next big eco-scare. I was right, if a few years early, and I did not spot that tomatoes, rather than dolphins, would be the species that touched the heart strings and purse strings of the green movement. I’ll append the essay at the end of this blog post for those that are interested.

I am even prouder of that sentence. At the time such a “lukewarm” view was unfashionable among activists, though not yet among scientists – and you were allowed to say things like that without being treated like a holocaust denier. But it’s not far from what I think now. Since the modal climate sensitivity in all the best studies is now settling down at a bit over 1.5 degC, and since the effect of aerosols, black carbon, ocean heat uptake etc are now all better understood and provide fewer and fewer excuses for high sensitivity models to disagree with data, for me to have come up with “about a degree” two whole decades ago, in a single sentence in an essay on other topics, seems quite surprising. Climate change was not my main interest then: I was writing a book about the evolution of sex having left the Economist to be my own boss.

Indeed, if you take a look at the graph below, you will see that over 34 years, there has been about 0.36 degrees of warming on a rolling average using data from five different sources: or on track for 1.08degC in a century, give or take. About a degree?

Graph from climate4you.com

I am not claiming prescience, more like surprise. As a journalist you get used to cringing at the things you once wrote, usually when you were too much of a slave to the conventional wisdom of the day. In this case, I feel no need to cringe.

Anyway, what’s the point of all this? Well, this sentence, taken out of context, was reprinted last week by a website called Deltoid in a blog post entitled rather strangely “The Australian’s War on Science 81: Matt Ridley’s 20 year old wrong prediction” (I am not an Australian, and I have as far as I recall only once written an article for the newspaper called the Australian; I have enlisted in no war on science – indeed if there is such a war, I’ll join the infantry on science’s side). The sentence was said to have come from the Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper that again I have hardly ever written for, in 1993.

Alerted by a tweet from Andrew Revkin, I replied in three tweets a few seconds apart: “I did not write for the Globe and Mail in 1993, let alone about climate…maybe the GandM quoted something else I wrote and anyway…not yet wrong”. This led to a torrent of tweets from some activist claiming I had denied the article, I was an idiot, etc. Good luck to him. Anyway somebody –- actually Gavin Schmidt – then kindly posted the article on the Deltoid website (the “owner” of which, Tim Lambert, had failed to do me the courtesy of letting me know he was posting this strange attack) so I could check that yes, I did write it and that yes unbeknownst to me the Globe and Mail did reprint it, presumably with the permission of the Economist, on the last day of 1993.

Now for all I know Tim Lambert may be very good at his day job, which is lecturing in computer graphics at the University of New South Wales. He may also be charming company. But let’s just parse his headline. “Matt Ridley’s 20-year-old wrong prediction”. In what way was it wrong? One fifth of a century has passed since I wrote that sentence – I’d hardly call it a prediction, more an assessment – so how can it be wrong yet to say that there will be a degree of warming in a century? And since the fullest data set over the longest period shows that we are on track for 1.08 degrees of warming in a century, “about a degree” is looking pretty good so far, though of course it is far too early to tell. I’m not claiming it was right, just that it’s 80 years premature to call it wrong.

But Lambert seemed to be under the impression that it was obvious that I was already wrong. In a series of tweets and in a very odd, cherry-picked graph with no data source cited, he kept insisting that there’s been 0.4 degrees of warming between 1993 and 2013. I showed him the above graph. Since 1993 was the low point of the post-Pinatubo cooling (conveniently) and by ignoring the black average line in the above graph but taking the one data point that is November 2012, he claimed justification. “UAH 0.42 warming over baseline. 1993 temp on baseline,” he tweeted. At this I have to admit, I burst out laughing so loudly my dog woke up. Truly the mind boggleth.

There ensued a silly little twitter war of words in which Lambert refused me room to reply in a blog post with diagrams – the comments space of his website does not fit diagrams — while a chorus of tweeters heaped abuse on my head. This is what passes for debate in climate science, or computer graphics departments, these days.

Now, let’s look at some predictions that HAVE failed.

First, the IPCC’s many models, only two of which looks any good at this stage. The rest have all overshot the real world by some margin. Woops.

Chart by John Christy.

Then James Hansen:

Chart from kaltesonne.de

All three of his scenarios were wildly higher than what actually happened, even though carbon dioxide emissions were HIGHER than in all three of his models.

Then IPCC again, this time for methane:

Chart from the leaked IPCC report.

Er, back to the drawing board, lads.

Now look, fellers, you do this kind of thing for a living. I’m just a self-employed writer with no back-up team, no government grants, no taxpayer salary, no computer simulations, and absolutely no pretensions to being Nostradamus about anything. But it strikes me I did a far better job of predicting the climate back in 1993 than any of you! How could that be?

Anyway, the whole episode was depressing in two ways.

First, it’s a little sad that a lecturer in computer graphics took the trouble to look up a sentence a freelance journalist wrote 20 years ago in a piece about something else and falsely claimed it was already “wrong” when it isn’t, and would hardly matter if it was. Does he not have anything better to do?

Second, it’s also a little sad to read just how little has changed in the climate debate since then. If I could travel back in time and tell my 34-year-old self in 1993 that I would be roughly right to take a “lukewarm” view about global warming, but that in the meantime the world would ignore me and would instead spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ways to prevent the poor getting rich with cheap electricity, on destroying rain forests to grow biofuels, on spoiling landscapes with windmills to provide less than half a percent of the world’s energy, and on annual conferences for tens of thousands of pampered activists, then surely my younger self would gape in disbelief.

Anyway, here’s the 1993 essay in case you’re interested.

=======================================================

The Globe and Mail (Canada), December 31, 1993 Friday

THE WORLD IN 1994 IDEAS ENVIRONMENT The Next Eco-Scare: Some environmental crises are genuine; others are carefully exploited fundraising bonanzas

By MATT RIDLEY The Economist

Like sharks, environmentalists must move forward or die. Without a constant supply of new incidents, new buzzwords and, above all, new threats, they cannot keep scaring people into sending the money that pays their salaries. For this reason alone, 1994 will produce a fresh crop of environmental scares. Not all will be bogus, but judging by the recent track record of the greens, many will.

The environmental movement has become increasingly driven by the push of marketing, rather than the pull of public outrage. When that happens to organizations, priorities change. For example, scientists at one of the biggest wildlife charities were firmly against arguing for an ivory-trade ban in 1989; they thought it would be bad for elephants. But their marketing people saw rival organizations, which had endorsed a ban, reaping large rewards from direct-mail campaigns. It was not long before the charity was urging an end to the ivory trade.

This takeover by marketing types is having an insidious effect. In the past, environmentalists were essentially reactive. It took an external event to trigger their campaigns: the Yom Kippur War led to the oil crisis, the hot American summer of 1988 made the greenhouse effect newsworthy. But that is not the way things work in the public relations world. Does Madonna just record a song and wait to see how popular it gets? Does Steven Spielberg make a film about dinosaurs and hope it sells? No, they hype their products, whether they are good or bad. And so, soon, will environmentalists.

If you were to design the next environmental threat, what you would come up with would be a scare that is invisible (like radiation), global (like the greenhouse effect), irreversible (like rain forest destruction), cancer-causing (like dioxin) and singles out furry animals (like a Canadian seal-clubber). To sharpen your marketing skills, invent the next threat out of these building blocks.

All over the world, as you read this, groups of environmental fundraisers are trying to think up next year’s top-selling Cassandra album. They remember the great hits of the 1980s: acid rain, Chernobyl, global warming, the ozone layer, Exxon Valdez, the ivory ban. Each was a fundraising bonanza. The 1990s have been less kind to them. When the Braer oil tanker went aground on Shetland in January, 1993, it was a bonanza for the newspapers: Environmental groups rushed to place advertisements featuring photographs of oil-soaked birds-photographs that had been kept on file for exactly this eventuality ever since the Persian Gulf War.

The Braer was, however, more of a disaster for the environmental movement than for the shags of Shetland (let alone the Socotra cormorants of the Arabian Gulf whose pictures adorned the advertisements). The oil quickly dispersed in heavy gales and did minimal damage.

As a consequence, oil spills have lost some of their power to extract funds from people’s pockets. Global warming, too, has shot its bolt, now that the scientific consensus has settled down on about a degree of temperature increase over a century-that is, little more than has taken place in the past century.

Biodiversity has some mileage left in it, because the rain forests are shrinking as fast as ever and nobody has come up with any good ideas of what to do about it, except form committees at the United Nations. Various follow-ups to the Rio convention of 1992 will take place in 1994, providing some opportunities for tugging heartstrings about the plight of Indians, three-toed sloths and esoteric fungi. But even Sting, a pop star, has wearied a little of the cynicism of the Indians he bought land for (they sold it to loggers).

Radioactivity? Not unless there’s another Chernobyl. The ozone layer? The public is bored. Electric fields causing cancer? Worth a try, but the studies keep coming up blank (try cellular phones instead). What about reviving the fads of the 1970s for predicting shortages of oil, food, water and raw materials? It will not wash; the elementary lessons of supply, demand and price substitution were too well taught by the 1980s.

One human ailment that is getting steadily worse is allergy. The evidence that allergies are diseases of the modern, technological world is now impressive (farmers and Victorian heroines rarely get allergies; only modern townspeople), and the deduction that they are somehow caused by air pollution is natural. If a scientist in 1994 can prove a link between, say, air pollution and allergies, then he or she can be sure of igniting a good campaign drawing attention to the “collapse of the human immune system.”

The other threat to raise will be genetic engineering. Suppose a genetically engineered virus designed to attack rabbits or aphids were to escape from a laboratory and start killing dolphins or cats; the leaflet writes itself long before the virus actually escapes. “This laboratory is creating cancer-causing viruses that could condemn one of nature’s most intelligent creatures to a lingering extinction, upset the fragile ecological balance of the biosphere and mutate into a deadly human plague. Don’t let it happen. Xed Jabong, lead guitarist of The Radical Sheep, urges you to help us act now.” You have been warned.

Matt Ridley is former science editor and U.S. editor of The Economist, and is the author of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.

Spot on, Matt, including your 1993 essay. Depressingly, what you could see through so clearly back then has not gone away. Manufactured doom-mongering has continued unabated while the public appears to have become even dumber–less likely to dismiss obvious crap. I think it might be a generational shift. Those born after the mid sixties, enjoying a silken passage through fail-free education appear to be extraordinarily credulous and highly conformist. If Roger Harrabin tells you that driving a SUV causes polar bears to spontaneously combust, it must be true…

Threat detected: Long, comforting, hot showers overwhelm immune systems. The first line of defense, our skin, no longer protects us from the constant barrage of ever-present pathogens. Allergies and arthritis will bring humanity to ground, unless we each shower only once a week, in cold water.

Thank you for reprinting that article.
I think this may be another one of those own-goals from the warming fraternity, where they actually draw attention to the weakness of their position and draw attention to the their opposition.

Yah there’s probably a band, called the radical sheep too.
Who knew this scare tactic would have been so successful? As with you Matt Ridley, if I was able to tell the me of 93, of how long and well this hysteria would run, I (93) would have called the 2013 version a nut.
As for the circle of wisdom, being dissed by the mutual admiration society of climate wisdom, is an honour, after 20 years they are still smarting over your accuracy.
If only they could have been so skilful.

Thanks Matt. I come here for reasoned discourse, not the frantic shouting of juvenile activists with nothing better to do than try to refute (unsuccessfully) statements made 20 years ago in order to “score points” with like minded dimwits.

Guys like Tim Lambert have no place in a polite and intellectually satisfying society.

The stalled temperatures the past 16 years (or more) puts the kaibosh on man’s C02 as a forcing of much consequence. Even a measely 1degC per century is being overly optimistic. It is probably more on the order of .3degC.

Matt, you take the time to reply to these climate-zombies for a prediction of yours that differs 8% from reality? Isn’t it about time you write something about their predictions that differ some order of magnitude from observations? You have the gift of writing convincingly, so make them sweat!

Matt Ridley says:“Now look, fellers, you do this kind of thing for a living. I’m just a self-employed writer with no back-up team, no government grants, no taxpayer salary, no computer simulations, and absolutely no pretensions to being Nostradamus about anything. ”

That’s your problem, Mr. Ridley–these guys you’ve just embarrassed DO have back-up teams, paid for by never-ending CASH from taxpayers, along with HUGE computers to purchase and maintain, and God-complexes that would put most doctors to shame.

Were these so-called “climate scientists” of which you speak independent and self-funded, they’d have no reason to go off like March hares screwing up their “climate science”, forcing global policy (with millions dead in their wake), and accusing YOU of lying when all you did was tell the truth.

Apparently money can’t buy honesty nowadays. If you gave these “climate scientists” proof positive that a deep freeze capable of killing most of humanity was on the horizon, they’d reject it since their paychecks demand it.

Is it just me, or is climate science the only branch of science that manages to consume tens of billions of dollars without providing humankind with a single byte of actionable intelligence? Science is meant to increase human knowledge, but climate science seems to have led only to an explosion in human *belief*. Have we learned anything useful about the climate that we didn’t know ten years ago?

Meanwhile real science is uncovering new wonders at a rate the interested reader couldn’t possibly keep up with.

I expect more of this kind of thing from Tim Lambert and others. They are starting to get stung by the ’17 years and no warming’ chorus and people playing back their failed forecasts. Warmists NEED to show areas where ‘non-warmer’ people have failed to forecast correctly to redress the balance. So they will be casting around looking for forecasts from ‘skeptics’ that can be noisily held up by the nodding donkeys of the main stream media for ridicule to even the scores.

If I was a greenie I too would take umbrage at the article because it exposes the way they still operate. The bit about marketing a scare would have water vapour coming out my ears and hunting furiously for a sentence that could be used to delegitimize the author.

“More of the earth’s reflected heat stays here rather than escaping to space. so, the planet is getting warmer.”

This was wrong then and it is still wrong. A more correct statement would be;

“More of the Earth’s reflected heat is DELAYED (NOT “stays here”) as it flows from the Sun to the Earth and then onwards towards the Universe. Since Light travels quite quickly this delay amounts to a few tens of milliseconds (assuming tens of bounces between the surface and the gases at the TOA), given that there are about 86 million milliseconds in a day this delay has no effect on the average temperature of the planet.”

An even more correct statement would be;

“Increases of “GHGs” simply cause slightly more energy to flow through the system (Sun/Earth/Atmosphere/Universe) at the speed light rather than the much slower velocity (distance travelled per unit time) of conduction and convection. This simply causes the gases in the atmosphere to heat up slightly faster when energy arrives (sunrise or the dissipation of clouds), or conversely cool down slightly faster when the energy source falls (sunset or the accumulation of clouds). This change in propagation delay is so small we probably cannot afford to measure it, the historical temperature databases do not contain the necessary information.”

In any thermodynamic system the component with the slowest propagation velocity of energy (thermal or visible light or infrared light) determines the response time. Only if that propagation velocity can be increased will other components with faster velocities affect the system’s response time. In the case of the Earth the component with the slowest velocity of heat flow is the oceans.

Making multiple passes through a system at the speed of light only DELAYS the energy flow, it does not SLOW the velocity.

One example of a similar configuration (a surface absorbing and reflecting light through relatively thin layers adjacent to the surface) is the Multi-Layer Interference Filter used on the surfaces of most modern optical systems. Only by the careful use of constructive and destructive optical interference is is possible to make more light “stay here” (i.e. inside your camera). Without optical interference no more light would “stay here”. There is no credible evidence that “GHGs” create any form of constructive or destructive interference.

Destructive and Constructive Interference are somewhat misleading names and seem to imply the destruction/creation of energy. But they do not, for every location where constructive interference creates twice as much energy there is another location (exactly one half wavelength away) where there is no energy present, thus two locations, two units of energy, no energy gain, no energy loss.

Otherwise a well constructed piece and I agree with the majority of your points.

“All three of his scenarios were wildly higher than what actually happened, even though carbon dioxide emissions were HIGHER than in all three of his models.”

This is wrong. Actual CO2 levels best track scenario B. It is important to be accurate as a sceptic and there is no need to exaggerate anyway, as scenario B is not even close to what actually happened.

Here’s one to remember Matt. I remember the psych professor coining it as the “Nine Times Rule”.

I truly wish I could find the paper, but I took that course in 1980.

Based on what I remember to have been a rather large study which I think might have been done in Illinois (persistence of memory…), the researchers had found that the human being is nine times more susceptible to rumor than it is to fact.

If you take a moment to actually think that through it explains almost everything in life.

Ridley says: “Second, it’s also a little sad to read just how little has changed in the climate debate since then.”

Since when, the early 90’s? Back then the science was all around if it was warming; now it has moved past that to details of why we are warming. I think that’s a rather big difference, sort of hard to miss for people who know what’s going on. Once upon a time weren’t you were a science reporter?

Global warming, too, has shot its bolt, now that the scientific consensus has settled down on about a degree of temperature increase over a century-that is, little more than has taken place in the past century.

it does not refer to the actual temperature increase, but the ‘scientific consensus.’ I can see where the Lambert’s of the world might think that the ‘scientific consensus’ still agrees on 3-5 degrees per century in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary. Of course their particular consensus is more religious than scientific, but that’s not how they see it.

I think it is very easy to get discouraged by the ‘popular rant.’ So I add another quote to encourage people against the continuing battle against ‘created truth.’ Another word we could use for that is blatant lies!!!

“For evil to flourish, all that is needed is for good people to do nothing.” Edmund Burke

I’ve spent the last two weeks going through the WUWT archives from startup in November 2006, and discovered that my first visit to this blog was in June 2012.

Up to then I was a happy climate alarmist, ready to send all you denier scumbags to death camps. Now I’m a lukewarmer, a skeptic’s skeptic or maybe I’m what John Lennon called a mocker.

My point is that there is hope for Tim Lambert. Of course my conversion resulted from the addition of information to a previous state of profound ignorance. M. Lambert doesn’t have that excuse, but he’s still young. Give him time.

trafamadore;
Since when, the early 90′s? Back then the science was all around if it was warming; now it has moved past that to details of why we are warming. I think that’s a rather big difference, sort of hard to miss for people who know what’s going on. Once upon a time weren’t you were a science reporter?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Since this troll has had it pointed out to he/she/it that there has been no warming since the late 90’s on at least a half dozen occasions as I recall, what are we to make of this statement? Are mental constructs such as “no warming” simply too complicated for this troll to understand? Or shall we presume that the troll deliberately misrepresents the facts? Once upon a time, was the troll a human being with reasoning capabilities and ethics?

oldfossil, you’re an important specimen and science should study you urgently :-) —someone who actually changed his/her mind and isn’t ashamed to admit it. I’d love to know more about your journey—what information was the clincher for you? What advice can you give us for opening the minds of other honest but misguided people? What were the factors that discouraged you from investigating the skeptical side for so many years (i.e. until June 2012)? I’m sure many of us appreciate and admire your frankness.

oh my, I think this is the most prophetic bit in the article. this man is a genius.

“If you were to design the next environmental threat, what you would come up with would be a scare that is invisible (like radiation), global (like the greenhouse effect), irreversible (like rain forest destruction), cancer-causing (like dioxin) and singles out furry animals (like a Canadian seal-clubber). To sharpen your marketing skills, invent the next threat out of these building blocks.”

“Once upon a time, was the troll a human being with reasoning capabilities and ethics?”

Yep. Before it was corrupted, Trollum was called Smeagol.

Actually, its combination of facile language (“the science was all around if it was warming”) and snarky condescension makes me wonder if it isn’t Naomi Oreskes gracing us with her pseudonymous thoughts.

Keyes says: “is climate science the only branch of science that manages to consume tens of billions of dollars”

At least in the US, 1.4 billion in 2011. Not tens of billiions. What uses tens of billions? cancer research, diabetes, those sorts of things.

Yes, “traf”, but over two decades it would easily add up to “tens of billions of dollars” (he didn’t specify the year 2011 as you weaseled your argument).

But the big difference is this: research in the areas of cancer, diabetes and those sorts of things is to find solutions and prolong life. “Climate science”, on the other hand, is not dedicated to such a noble cause; it is intended to drastically increase the cost of fuel, and thereby make life exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible, for millions of Earth’s inhabitants living “on the edge”.

So internalize your misguided, self-righteous, pious opinion in the orifice of your choice and realize you are part of the problem and not part of any solution.

troll says;Well, let’s see. Not to pick the time scale to start about the last super high year of ’98,

I didn’t pick the time scale, you did. You said, and a quote “Since when, the early 90′s? Back then the science was all around if it was warming; now it has moved past that to details of why we are warming. I merely pointed out that the warming stopped just a few short years after the “early 90’s” and has been absent for over 1.5 decades since then.

let’s stick with what we randomly started with, the early 90′s. So, has it warmed since the early 90′s? Yes it has.

Why yes it has. Of course it stopped warming right after that which is rather the while point. It is warmer now than it was in the Little Ice Age too, and the last full ice age before that and the one before that. But right now CO2 is increasing at the fastest rates in centuries, is at its highest levels in centuries, and for more than a decade and a half…no warming.

So maybe warming has stopped. Or maybe not.

So maybe the science of the early 90’s isn’t so settled after all and we haven’t moved beyond that to why after all? Awful hard to ask “why” something is a certain way when it isn’t that way. Well, unless you are a small child who is fond of repeating WHY? in response to everything an adult says with marked determination to drive them insane. Raised a lot of kids troll, I’m pretty much immune to the tactic.

Oh no. Oh no. I see it now. “davidmhoffer” is actually Gleick! Why did I not see that all along!

Ah, so the troll has gone from the inability to see facts that do exist, to the ability to see facts that do not exist. Either that, or the troll thinks it has a sense of humour. (If the troll was trying to insult me, I stand corrected. Bemused, but corrected.)

Thanks Matt and (to echo a few people above) I wish you were still at The Economist – I might still be a subscriber if you were!

Did you write a piece there in the early 90’s which catalogued the history of science scares? I remember it listed the stages: Scientist finds interesting anomaly; obscure reporter picks it up and repeats it; scientist gets more funding as pressure group picks it up and creates a BIG DEAL; scientist realises it is actually not a big deal, but it has now got so big politicians are involved; after a few years of mass panic, everyone gets embarrassed about the scare but to save face keep on repeating it; finally it gets forgotten in the next panic.

I remember it used global cooling as the example and I tried to find it in the Economist on-line archives back when I still subscribed, but I couldn’t locate it. The thing is, The Economist not having bylines for authors, I never knew who wrote it. Given your time there coincides, I suspect it was you – any chance you still have it?

Apparently the rest of the world is not kept up to date with the huge numbers of job cuts that have occurred at UNSW. They are cutting jobs in each faculty one by one, it’s less suspicious that way…

Long story short, Lambert was pretty good at his day job — I got top marks in one of his courses once — until his day job got axed. Notice a previous commenter said Adjunct Lecturer: that’s the title of “we had to fire you but we liked you enough to keep your account on the school system.”

@trafamadore Please stop nit-picking everything and anything. Most of us here are here to discuss someone named Matt Ridley who basically 20 years before his time basically got everything correct. We can argue over details all day long, but the entire premise of getting (basically) everything correct in a prediction? 20 years ago? Seriously? Can we say obsessed that someone even thinks to bring something like this up?

Matt, I can see why you’re no longer at the Economist. The media, including formerly respectable media like The Economist, has joined academia and federal agencies in purging those who attempt to present a balanced “pro-con” on the climate issue. The Economist comes up periodically as a topic on WUWT; last year on the question of arctic ice:https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/16/the-economist-provides-readers-with-erroneous-information-about-arctic-sea-ice/
My two cents at that time follow, and I see from the posts here that I’m in good and big company:
” I used to subscribe to and read The Economist for many years. Back in the 1970′s, some Brits on the faculty would leave copies in the reading room at the Institue of Arctic and Alpine Research in good ol’ Boulder, Colorado. I found the magazine’s free market perspective back then quite refreshing.
” Fast forward to 2008…. The Economist endorses Barack Obama for president, saying “America, it’s about time”, but offering no reasons why we should prefer him over the other guy, and providing no investigation into Obama’s background or any ideas on what his real political and economic philosophies could be. The reporting, if I dare call it such, was most shallow and un-insightful. The same applies to their coverage of “climate change”, where they buy the IPCC line uncritically.
” I calibrate sources by how they cover subjects I know something about – perhaps more than the source does, at times – and The Economist fails this calibration test miserably. I have no reason to think their coverage of diamond mining or Kazakhstan is any more profound than their coverage of Global Warming or Barack Obama, so there’s no point in sinking the big bucks for this magazine. Sadly, the E-communist has lost its free market roots and has sunk to the shallow and slanted reporting of the rest of the media.”

“Well, let’s see. Not to pick the time scale to start about the last super high year of ’98, let’s stick with what we randomly started with, the early 90′s. So, has it warmed since the early 90′s?”

Truth is, you can pick any baseline and rise as you feel best serves your position. So far, in post-MPT time, two interglacials stand out in larger climate relief than this one so far has. MIS-11 and MIS-5e. Both had very different climate rides right at their very ends. MIS-5e scored one before it gradually decayed into the MIS-19 glacial, MIS-5e had two, the second one being larger.

And both producing thermal and sea level excursions that are quite laughably larger than whatever (so far (AR4) has been anthropogenetically prognosticated.

My actuary looks at your most recent “credible”, but now 6-year old AR4 worst case bet, of +0.59M MSL by 2100, with respect to my last peer-reviewed raise and concludes that at worst I have bested you by at least an order of magnitude (natural end-extreme-interglacial natural climate noise times ~10, which would be +5.9M not +6M), the upper evaluation plunking down almost 2 orders of magnitude (nearly a factor of 100).

In this global Texas-Holdem climate-game of ours, I really should be terrified by your “best bet” coming in at less than 1/10th of what the last interglacial may have scored, sea-level wise, at a maximum, But the upper-error bar of the last sea level highstand “pot” quite naturally rates nearer to 1/100th of your most recent “best-guess”……..

Which would suggest to a truly wise wise one that on things which actually have happened the science is not all that well settled. Which necessarily leaves the science being settled on things which have not happened yet a bit unsettling…………

As uncomplimentary as it might sound means you need to up your game. A lot!

Because I simply cannot hear you over what should naturally be, the regular, normal, quite natural, end post-MPT extreme interglacial climate noise. With all of their regular trademark thermal excursions.

You need to make more anthropogenic signal if you expect to be identifiable as super-natural climate noise.

Global warming, too, has shot its bolt, now that the scientific consensus has settled down on about a degree of temperature increase over a century-that is, little more than has taken place in the past century.
+++++++
You were arguably wrong that global warming had shot its bolt in 1993. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised by the scare since then. However, you were correct in your prediction that the warming would not be nearly as bad as the hype. And you were correct in your prediction that the purpose of the hype was to raise money, not to actually save the environment.

@Old Fossil: Before Al Gore’s movie, I accepted that the world was warming and that CO2 had something to do with it. I did not think much about it, as I thought we’d adapt. But after seeing the movie, I had a ton of questions. And the engineer in me went out on a pursuit to find the truth of what was being said… and to understand why people thought this. I then read State of Fear, not even knowing what it was about… it was just a book my wife bought me. I most enjoyed John Kenner, the scientist for how he reasoned through what was said and what was happening.

After that, I found WUWT… and this is my main source to hear things out… My process control background shows that “climate science” is mostly political and seeks to find a predetermined conclusion with a closed mind, case closed attitude. I look forward to the cooling, only in that it may stop the nonsense and waste of our world’s wealth.

Excellent article from 1993/4 and a great riposte. It seems to me that Mr Lambert would do well to stick to his own specialism, though, if his ‘scientific rigour’ in that is as good as what he has shown in his piece attacking your article – I would not want to engage his services in that field either.

Actually most of the warming idiots seems to come from Australian Universities. Its a pity they used to have a reasonably good higher education system. It all stopped with Keating and Hawkins the then Minister of Education or whatever if I recall.

‘I’d draw your attention to this remark by Ridley (from his WUWT article)

‘There ensued a silly little twitter war of words in which Lambert refused me room to reply in a blog post with diagrams – the comments space of his website does not fit diagrams — while a chorus of tweeters heaped abuse on my head.’

It seems that those who accuse him of ‘chickening out of the debate’ (eg Lotharsson) have it arsebackwards if this is true. Did Lambert refuse him space here to make his case

“I think this may be another one of those own-goals from the warming fraternity, where they actually draw attention to the weakness of their position and draw attention to the their opposition.”

The problem is that those who tweeted Matt will never read the rebuttal. Most of the readers at @deltoid are now convinced the Matt Ridley was wrong and that if he is the best that deniers can come with then the green gravy train can keep on rolling.

The Economist in the 90’s those were the days. I cancelled my subscription more than a decade ago when they changed editors and jumped on the AGW bandwagon with a megaphone and complete abandonment of their previous impartiality.

Japanese proverb “To know where you are going you need to know where you came from”

Whilst looking back into the past check this Youtube clip from 1990
Channel four Equinox Documentary its what started all for me.This was more than just another TV show about the weather it was the day i became politically aware.

Marks out of ten for the post by Mr Ridley. TEN.
Ditto the 1993 article.
What strongly supports the views of the 1993 article in respect of the Eco charities is actually the percentage of their donations which deal with the issue. It used to be 30% and now it’s 20%?

Matt Ridley’s response misses one important point – Tim Lambert’s graph is a complete fake!
Lambert draws a green line on his graph and labels it “Ridley Prediction”.
He then talks of Ridleys remark of 1 degree per century.
So we’d assume that Lambert’s graph had a slope of 1 degree/century.
But it doesn’t, as noted by Nick Barnes in the comments.
In fact Lambert’s green line has a slope of about 0.5C/century!
The dishonesty of the climate activists never ceases to amaze me.

“There ensued a silly little twitter war of words in which Lambert refused me room to reply in a blog post with diagrams – the comments space of his website does not fit diagrams — while a chorus of tweeters heaped abuse on my head. This is what passes for debate in climate science, or computer graphics departments, these days.”

It seems that your assessment 20y ago was pretty astute. Probably helped by by the fact that the corruption of climate science was only just beginning at that time.

You expectation that anything can be “discussed” on a medium as limited as Twitter is less astute.The format is too limited to discuss with even if you someone intelligent and of good will to converse with. It’s use is limited to trivia like ” my @buggie is dead. I think I’ll get a @parrot” or alerting someone to some event as you say Revkin did in this case.

Thanks to those who expressed interest in my conversion on the road to Damascus. I first came to WUWT to read Dr. Robert Brown’s “Response to Dr. Paul Bain’s use of ‘denier’ in the scientific literature.” I admitted that I’d been guilty, wrong, and unfair on that particular issue, and the arguments presented in the rest of the article made sense. So I started to educate myself. Spin only works on the ignorant, and I saw that I’d been the gullible victim of a well-organized campaign of misinformation.

My legal training makes me pretty good at identifying false or irrelevant evidence. I can also recognize a dishonest or merely fallacious argument. And trust me there are just as many wrong-thinkers on the skeptic side as you’ll find at SkepSci.

So thank you to commenters like Climate Ace and trafamadore. A lot of people here don’t want you to challenge their thinking because they’re scared that they might be wrong. The only way that I know if I’m right is if I test my opinions all the time against new facts and more persuasive arguments. I want to learn. I want to improve. And I’m willing to change.

According to the IPCC (AR4) “… Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations …”.
Since c.1950 the HadCRUT 3 series shows a linear trend of + 0.6 C since 1950 (60 years) so according to the doctrine, at most, human CO2 emissions may be responsible for about 1 C per century.
Of course empirical evidence is the old paradigm, it’s so last century.

trafamadore says:
January 15, 2013 at 6:35 pm
Keyes says: “is climate science the only branch of science that manages to consume tens of billions of dollars”

At least in the US, 1.4 billion in 2011. Not tens of billiions. What uses tens of billions? cancer research, diabetes, those sorts of things.

In the US alone there are about 60 million households. If every household’s annual electricity bill goes up by $500 to pay for green energy, the bill comes to, um, could it be, $30 billion a year? Add roughly the same for the eurozone and the UK and we’re talking serious bucks.

Is it just me, or is climate science the only branch of science that manages to consume tens of billions of dollars without providing humankind with a single byte of actionable intelligence? Science is meant to increase human knowledge, but climate science seems to have led only to an explosion in human *belief*….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
‘Climate science’ was never a real science. It was specifically manufactured to produce the ‘crisis’ in a “Crisis-Reaction-Solution” set-up to drive humans into accepting government mandates that people would never otherwise have accepted.

WTO director, Pascal Lamy is pretty blunt about it. He wants ‘Global Governance’ where nations give up their national sovereignty. He identifies what it will take

The last challenge that I see is that of legitimacy – for legitimacy is intrinsically linked to proximity, to a sense of “togetherness”. By togetherness, I mean the shared feeling of belonging to a community. This feeling, which is generally strong at the local level, tends to weaken significantly as distance to power systems grows. It finds its roots in common myths, a common history, and a collective cultural heritage.

Our interdependence has grown beyond anyone’s imagination in fact! Economic and financial shocks spread faster than ever before. With the recent economic crisis we discovered that the collapse of one part of an economy can trigger a chain-reaction across the globe. With the climate crisis, that our planet is an indivisible whole. With the food crisis, that we are dependent on each other’s production and policies to feed ourselves. And with the flu epidemic, that speedy international cooperation is vital. The scope of the challenges the world is facing has changed profoundly in the past decades — more profoundly, I suspect, than we fully understand. The world of today is virtually unrecognizable from the world in which we lived one generation ago.

climate crisis,
The IPCC mandate states:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation and adaptation.http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/

Humans were tried and found guilty BEFORE the IPCC ever looked at a scientific fact. The IPCC mandate is not to figure out what factors effect the climate but to dig up the facts needed to hang the human race. The IPCC assumes the role of prosecution and and the skeptics that of the defense but the judge (aka the media) refuses to allow the defense council into the court room.

Academia is providing the manufactured evidence to ‘frame’ the human race and they are KNOWINGLY doing so. In other words Academics who prides themselves as being ‘lofty socialists’ untainted by plebeian capitalism are KNOWINGLY selling the rest of the human race into the slavery designed by the bankers and corporate elite. (Agenda 21 & Global Governance)Food CrisisHow Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis
Bill Clinton admits WTO Agreement on Ag intentionally caused famine linkindepth comment on Food Crisis

Economic Crisis
Bill Clinton wrecked the economy beyond repair on November 2 ,1999 with the repeal of Glass-Stegall which tore down the wall between investment banks and S&Ls. Barney Frank (D-Mass) also has his fingerprints all over this mess with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act which required lenders to make risky loans to low-income minorities to purchase housing. Clinton’s signing of the laws that repealed the McFadden Act of 1927, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 lead to the Formation of Mega Banks. He is also responsible for the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that was responsible for marginal mortgage loans doomed to fail and the unregulated CDSs used to insure the banks against foreclosure.

Clinton was President from 1993 to 2001. Statistics showed in 1990, before WTO was ratified by Clinton, foreign ownership of U.S. assets amounted to 33% of U.S. GDP. By 2002, just after he left office this had increased to over 70% of U.S. ~ link

Update: Lambert did eventually say on twitter that I could post a reply on his blog. Not sure if that was before or after he saw that I had already posted it here. I’m happy to do both. Waiting for the details of how to send it to him.

There was a time when the Economist was not a run of the mill propaganda rag? Well, I’d be interested to see whether the switch paid off for them, and whether the money came from more sales or from American progressive foundations.

An extraordinarily insightful article for 1993. Sadly, the Economist has moved on and is now in the thrall of the CAGW cult.

Matt Ridley comments how environmental activism is the product of its own marketing. Scary is good, as this produces the bucks. The marketing guys obviously looked around and modeled their organisations on some of the loony, pseudo-religious, cults infesting America’s Bible Belt. Some of these cults have had extraordinary long term success in separating the faithful from their bucks, just so their leaders can live outrageously opulent lifestyles.

it’s a system that obviously works, as the IPCC’s Pachauri designed his TERI organisation in exactly the same way.

The ironic thing about Matt Ridley reprinting his articles from the past is the obvious fact that the 1986 article is more accurate than his 1994 comments.

Perhaps it was unclear in 94 that water vapor was increasing in the atmosphere and is an unavoidable feedback amplifying the effects of CO2. Now the direct observations confirm that. By comparison his 1994 prediction that AGW was a past issue with little more than a degC rise by 2100 and as an environmental concern would be supercided by GM looks ridiculous in the light of the statements of every major scientific organisation issuing increasingly strong warnings about AGW since 1994 and the ongoing warming, ice melt and sea level rise.

As there has already been most of a 1 degree rise since 1850,(more in the US 48) and with 87 years still to go the 1986 article looks much more accurate than the 1994 suggestion that warming would never exceed a single degree. we have already had around 11 inches of sea level rise and the rate is increasing, a minimum of 2 feet by 2100 is now looking conservative, although 10 feet still seems unlikely even if the Greenland ice-cap is melting ~3x as fast as it was in the 1990s

I would commend Matt Ridley for getting it right in the 1986 article, but suggest that his partial renunciation of that position since is obviously mistaken in the light of subsequrent climate change.

Keyes says: “is climate science the only branch of science that manages to consume tens of billions of dollars”
At least in the US, 1.4 billion in 2011. Not tens of billiions. What uses tens of billions? cancer research, diabetes, those sorts of things.”

You have been asked on many occasions to support your remarks with facts. So I take no small pleasure in providing REAL facts to my comments!

In the UK the estimated Tax revenue from ‘green taxes’ (filched from the population, including those officially deemed to be in “fuel poverty”) to waste on ‘Green Energy’ is:

for the years 2012/13 – £2.5 Billion which at todays exchange rate is $4.0 Billion
for the years 2015/16 – £6.6 Billion which at todays exchange rate is $10.6 Billion

As an aside; I have watched your puerile discourse on these blogs with some amusement. Your diatribe has added nothing constructive to any of the discussions. All you seem capable of is enhancing your credentials as a ‘troll’, so keep up the good work :-)

Well I don’t understand what Lambert is on about. If you take UAH from 1993 to 2013 you get 0.3C of warming – not 0.5. For the RSS it’s even less. And that works out to be 0.15C per decade, does it not?

Since that is only 20 years that seems a bit disingenuous to say he is wrong over the course of a century. It’s only 2 decades of data. Go back 3 decades and the rate is just about 0.11C per decade – so that is in line with what he suggested.

Hi Matt, just wanted to say I have your book “The Red Queen” (which I assume is the one you allude to) amongst your others and must have read it about six times. Excellent and thought provoking. Good luck with the climate crowd – but then you know what the game’s like anyway.

Just a warning…. His little group of green alarmist, privileged prats think they are God’s gift to science. Good luck if you go there. They are a pack of conceited know-alls who think that anyone who disagrees with them, or Little Timmy, must be attacked.

Lambert is a good example of the problems with academic institutions in Australia.
This computer programmer thinks that because he is a ‘university teacher’ that he knows more than anyone else about everything.
Why doesn’t he stick to computing and leave science to scientists? Oops… sorry, climate models need computing. Maybe they need some better science input too! How come little timmy didn’t ‘model’ a zero temperature change trend over the last 16 years?

How does Tim Lambert explain his contempt for anyone who disagrees with his alarmist views now that the British Met office has determined that there has been no significant global warming for 16 years?
Of course he either ignores this or he calls it a lie!

As it becomes clearer that his alarmist climate predictions are grossly exaggerated It will be very interesting to watch as bullies like Lambert backtrack on the rabid attacks on anyone who disagreed.

As time progresses and temperatures continue to trend flat and do not rise as predicted by the ‘climate models’ used by computer programmers like Lambert how will they explain? They have used teaching positions, public funding and government grants to ‘bully’ students and public to believe that small increases in a trace gas will be the ‘end of our world’.

will they continue pushing their lies or apologise for the errors they have made with the poor science they teach.

@- Planck
“…. now that the British Met office has determined that there has been no significant global warming for 16 years?”

The trouble with this claim is that there IS significant warming if you measure it over 18 years, or 14 years. The lack of frequentist statistical significance is restricted to a very small window of highly selected dates.

The main sink, source and transport of energy in the climate system is water in its various forms. Sea level, sea surface temperatures, ocean heat content, atmospheric water vapor and ice melt have all shown significant changes over the last 16 years, focusing on land temperatures is picking on a rather minor proxy indicator of climate change. Although I do agree it is where we all live, so the air temperature a metere or so abover the surface is of greatest interest to us even if it is a rather noisy and uncertain indicator of what the climate is doing.

Additionally I know of no credible predictions that the main indicators of warming in the SSTs, sea level, ice melt and humidity rise are going to reverse any time soon. In fact the vast, overwhelming majority of scientific understanding of this issue is that warming will continue for another century at least even if the rise in atmospheric CO2 was stopped tommorrow.

This is surely knee-jerk commentary. Do you parse what you commit to posterity?

The ongoing warming… Has plateaued over the last 16 years plus.
Sea level rise … Both first and second order have not accelerated over the last 200 years.
Ice melt … Not globally. Why is this bad anyway?

I’m sorry you have been treated so badly Matt. You are entitled to your opinion. Sometimes I despair that free speech is becoming a thing of the past especially in Australia.

I have to say I don’t agree with your ‘theory’ about CO2. If you read about solar cycles you will soon see that we are about to enter a period of global cooling, maybe even a mini ice age. There have been some good articles here on WUWT about that.

RockyRoad says: “Climate science”, on the other hand, is not dedicated to such a noble cause; it is intended to drastically increase the cost of fuel”

In your opinion.

Your arguments are generally laughable, “traf”, but on this issue you are so obviously wrong that I simply need to mention two examples that are the darlings of you Warmistas: wind and solar.

Solar costs roughly 40 cents per KWh and wind costs 20 cents per KWh when all of the subsidies are included. There isn’t a state in the union where the average cost of electricity is anywhere near this high:

So your argument that it is simply my “opinion” is your EPIC FAIL, “traf”. And I want everybody* to observe that, as a troll, you are a very dishonest one.

Or pile nuclear energy on top of my rebuttal to your lame statement as another indicator–if the Warmistas were really interested in the environment, they’d focus on thorium reactors like the Chinese are doing, or fund a more promising technology like LENR (go through the YouTube series by Frank Znidarsic for a complete explanation of the theory and irrefutable math that supports it).

But NO, “traf”, they aren’t! And anything that proves your nefarious ploy is suddenly just “opinion” but only a facinorous** troll like you would be so blatantly dishonest. You either refuse to see reality, or have a vested interest in making life more difficult for your fellow man.

(I could have said that “climate science” has the unintended consequence of drastically increasing the cost of fuel but there are sufficient statements from officials and supporters of the Warmista cult that that isn’t likely–they clearly understand what this whole charade will do to energy costs and its impact on the poor worldwide. They simply don’t care or they’re comfortable with the dire consequences.)

* On average, ~100,000 visitors a day come to WUWT–that’s a huge audience.
** Facinorous: One of my favorite words, “traf”–look up the definition and look in the mirror.

I think the only thing you got wrong in the 1997 article was how long it has taken for people to realise CAGW is a crock and to begin the embarrassing climb-down. I think you said 7 years, but everything takes longer once the UN gets in on the act so I am not going to criticize you for that!

…we have already had around 11 inches of sea level rise and the rate is increasing, a minimum of 2 feet by 2100 is now looking conservative, although 10 feet still seems unlikely even if the Greenland ice-cap is melting ~3x as fast as it was in the 1990s….

Can we even say that 1 degree warming is down to anthropogenic CO2? Once you deduct the on-going natural warming since the end of the LIA, what are you left with?

Only of you don’t consider negative feedbacks. The inconvenient truth for the Alarmists is that whatever warming effect man’s C02 has is too small to distinguish from natural warming. In terms of climate, it is of little consequence, and most certainly nothing to get all hot and bothered about.

We’re disappointed to see that, despite our best efforts to re-educate you, you are still insiting on making the standard denialist mistake of basing your position on verifiable fact and objective evidence.

Because of your continued refusal to adopt standard Climate Science procedures we must now ask you to refrain from further comment on the subject, either privately or in public. If you refuse this reasonable request then we shall have no option but to villify you at every opportunity.

As there has already been most of a 1 degree rise since 1850,(more in the US 48) and with 87 years still to go the 1986 article looks much more accurate than the 1994 suggestion that warming would never exceed a single degree.

Between 1910 and 1945 there was a rise in global temperature of more than 0.42 deg C (according to GISS). Are you suggesting this was due to the increase in atmospheric CO2. I can assure you that the IPCC certainly don’t think it was since they’ve gone to a lot of trouble publishing reports of “detection and attribution” studies which attempt to explain the 1910-45 warming (and later cooling). Many of these cite a strong solar influence in the early 20th century as a major cause. This hypothesis, though, has been thoroughly trashed by Leif Svalgaard (among others) who has found that there was no appreciable trend in solar activity over the past 300 years.

I’m not particularly having a pop at you (the ‘sceptics’ are just as much at fault in interpreting data to suit ther own needs) but it’s clear that there is a lot going on that is not properly understood or can’t be explained. Note, also, that if you check out the GISS zonal data for the 1910-45 period you’ll find that the arctic (64N-90N) warmed by ~1.5 deg – and cooled by more than 1 deg between 1945 and 1975. This, for so many reasons, puts any speculation about ‘aerosol cooling’ in to considerable doubt.

Teasing out the CO2 contribution to warming is nigh on impossible but, after playing around with the available data (all datasets), I’m inclined to go with the Ridley estimate of around 1 deg (perhaps 1.5 deg) warming for 2xCO2.

Each side first plots out then trots out graphs each with a strategically chosen beginning point, but we need to keep an eye on the ball, don’t we? How much effect in any of this, if any, is anthropogenic? It seems to me that that is the only thing worth arguing about.

Lambert’s blog is the Mary Celeste of the online world.
A ghostly ship drifting from nowhere to nowhere and uninhabited except for a few manic cackles from the departed.
You must be thinking of the mythical Flying Dutchman. He and his blog are condemmed to sail the high seas of the internet, purposeless, and with no living souls aboard.
The Mary Celeste was very real, the only mystery being what happened to the inhabitants.

izen says:
January 16, 2013 at 2:28 am
———————————————————————————————————
izen says a bunch of BS about how S.L rise is accelerating. It is not.

Some reports state that sea level rise poses a threat to United States natural habitats, with other reports focusing on risks to developed areas. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) temperatures due to human activity began to rise after 1980, but estimates of sea level show a rise from about 1870 (earliest records) at a nearly linear rate and with no sign of acceleration. Sea level rise from 1870 to 1980 is not likely due to human activity. One report indicates that IPCC has projected a sea level rise of 0.4 to 2 m by 2090, but the fourth IPCC report does not make such a claim, instead giving a best estimate of 0.28 to 0.43 m. Recent levels of rise (http://sealevel.colorado.edu), at 3.1 mm/year long-term trend or 0.31 m in 100 years with no indication of “acceleration,” are only consistent with the lowest IPCC projections. In fact, recent deceleration of the rate of rise (Houston and Dean 2011) has been detected. Examples of papers that projected sea level increases lower than the range discussed in the fourth IPCC report are Bouwer (2011), Chu et al. (2010), Czymzik et al. (2010), and Xie et al. (2010).

Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) is routinely used to adjust sea-level trends determined from tide-gauge data to improve estimates of worldwide sea-level rise. This adjustment may be appropriate for formerly glaciated high-latitude (referred to as FGHL) areas where vertical land motions due to GIA are large compared with motions produced by other phenomena. However, since GIA is only one component of vertical motion, does adjusting for it outside FGHL areas improve sea-level rise estimates or bias them? We compare global positioning system (GPS) gauge measurements with the vertical land-motion component of GIA predictions at 147 worldwide locations that are near tide gauges and outside FGHL areas and find remarkably little correlation. We analyze the data in several ways to determine the source of the lack of correlation. We also find that the average vertical motion for the 147 locations measured by GPS is subsidence, whereas the average GIA prediction is zero.”
Tha’ts worth repeating: “the average vertical motion for the 147 locations measured by GPS is subsidence, whereas the average GIA prediction is zero.”http://www.jcronline.org/doi/abs/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-11-00227.1

I also am a former long-time Economist subscriber. Politics intensified and economics faded. My favorite part had been the international data section on the back pages. Of course all of that data is now a Google search away.

I think the replacement of content with blather was forced by changes in the publishing environment. They could not survive today doing what they used to do. With information and good writing free for those willing to hunt, they may have been forced into the role of providing comfort and affirmation to mainstream narratives.

e.g. There were probably five popular econ blogs writing about the platinum coin before they could publish. That used to be their readership. How could they be relevant?

…
Additionally I know of no credible predictions that the main indicators of warming in the SSTs, sea level, ice melt and humidity rise are going to reverse any time soon. In fact the vast, overwhelming majority of scientific understanding of this issue is that warming will continue for another century at least even if the rise in atmospheric CO2 was stopped tommorrow.

By “credible predictions”, do you mean from computer models that were programmed to make those very predictions?

By “warming will continue” do you understand it has been warming since the LIA, and so may or may not continue to do so–until the next Ice Age commences?

By “if the rise in atmospheric CO2 was stopped tomorrow” do you realize it is preferable to increase CO2 so the biosphere fluorishes rather than to lie and say such an increase is catastrophic to our climate (ask any geologist what the earth was like with far higher levels than we currently enjoy)?

It sounds like you enjoy drama, izen, but can you do much if anything to control a chaotic system that is getting better in terms of foodstuff production? Or are you one of those people that would prefer a much smaller world population? And are you willing to be included in the portion “reduced”?

I’ve only been a participant in the climate debate for six months but I have built a flat mathematical spreadsheet to predict planetary temperatures based roughly on the (incomplete) http://bartonpaullevenson.com/NewPlanetTemps.html model using the Stefan-Boltzman constant, and would you believe there’s a Beer-Lambert Law, no relation to Tim I think though being an Aussie he’s probably no stranger to beer.

@inez, until you’ve done the basic math you can’t really claim to understand the greenhouse effect. My model is probably very similar to the equations that Hansen based his 1988 claims on. By now, Planet Earth should be a full 1K hotter than it is.

But for some reason that nobody understands, and let me state that although we have numerous hypotheses, if they made talking $hit a capital offence it would solve the population explosion overnight– where was I. Yes. Contrary to all expectations there is some kind of negative feedback preventing global temperatures from rising. My own theory is that the hiatus in warming almost exactly coincides with Vladimir Putin’s terms in office as President and Prime Minister of the Russian Republic, and I would not put anything past the KGB, or FSB as Putin’s colleagues are now known. Prove me wrong.

Apart from that, @izen, I don’t have major disagreements with anything you say, because I believe that a warm planet is a happy planet. The Greenlanders are reportedly rather pleased with the warmer climate that wicked Big Oil has forced upon them. The Canooks, Mongolians, Siberians, Finns, and Inuits aren’t complaining either. There is nothing in the 26 dimensions of superstring theory that says one morality is better than another, and your sense of outrage that the earth is failing to remain at one arbitrarily selected “ideal” temperature, is misplaced. So let’s all just crack a beer and, well, chill.

Keyes says: “is climate science the only branch of science that manages to consume tens of billions of dollars”

At least in the US, 1.4 billion in 2011. Not tens of billiions. What uses tens of billions? cancer research, diabetes, those sorts of things.”
_*_*_*_*_*_*_*__*__*_*_*_*_*_*_*
Well, according to this Forbes article, the US Government Accounting Office brings your number into question.http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/08/23/the-alarming-cost-of-climate-change-hysteria/
Maybe the government report is off by a margin but, $8.8 B in 2010 and $106.7 B from 2003 to 2010 makes it seem highly unlikely that spending in 2011 is only $1.4 B. Where are you getting this seemingly ridiculously low number from?

izen, FYI, increased water vapor is a PROPOSED feedback to increased CO2. It has, however, not been observed in the real world. In fact water vapor in its various roles may well act to reduce the impact of CO2.

izen says:
January 16, 2013 at 3:54 amAdditionally I know of no credible predictions that the main indicators of warming in the SSTs, sea level, ice melt and humidity rise are going to reverse any time soon. In fact the vast, overwhelming majority of scientific understanding of this issue is that warming will continue for another century at least even if the rise in atmospheric CO2 was stopped tommorrow.

Logic – total Fail. Nobody but a complete idiot would expect the effects of warming to suddenly reverse themselves. Despite the fact the warming has stopped the last 16 or so years (and counting), we are still warmer (though the actual amount of warming has been skewed upwards by the faulty temperature records).
As far as your “the warming will continue”, that is simply a faith-based statement. Indications are that we’ll be cooling the next few decades. C02’s warming powers have been vastly overrated.

Wrong, sea level rise may pause and accelerate along with ENSO but archeological and eclipse records confirm that sea level was stable and trendless for thousands of years until the recent warming.

@-John Finn
“Teasing out the CO2 contribution to warming is nigh on impossible but, after playing around with the available data (all datasets), I’m inclined to go with the Ridley estimate of around 1 deg (perhaps 1.5 deg) warming for 2xCO2.”

I am sorry but I see no reason to find the agreement between you and Matt Ridley as more compelling than the slightly higher (2.5degC) sensitivity than Baysian analysis derives from the work of thousands of scientists over the last 100 years.

@-Billy Liar
“Which planet are you on at the moment?
[LINK- to the Sun, D.-Z., Y. Yu, and T. Zhang, 2009: paper on humidity”

That paper is 4 years old and is specifically about computer models NOT direct observations. for the current observed changes see the paper I linked above.

@-RockyRoad
“It sounds like you enjoy drama, izen, but can you do much if anything to control a chaotic system that is getting better in terms of foodstuff production? Or are you one of those people that would prefer a much smaller world population? And are you willing to be included in the portion “reduced”? ”

I prefer to avoid drama, Human city based civilisation emerged during the vetry stable climate of the Holocene over the last ~7000 years. Most of our agricultural systems are dependent on that climate stability, when it becomes more varied (hotter or colder) civilisations collapse.
I am unconvinced that modern technocratic civilisations are any more resilient than Roman, Mayan Aztec, Anasazi, Chan, Cambodian or any of the other major world civilisations that have failed in the past freom the stresses caused by climate variation.

Izod … by the way, what do eclipse records have to do with sea level? Tidal ranges change slowly as continents drift and the moon gets further away. Eclipses can say something about the rate at which the moon is receding and whether or not the rate has been stable, but what does that have to do with the price of eggs?

Each side first plots out then trots out graphs each with a strategically chosen beginning point, but we need to keep an eye on the ball, don’t we? …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You have a problem “graphs each with a strategically chosen beginning point”? Ok then How about This One?

smac says: “Maybe the government report is off by a margin but, $8.8 B in 2010 and $106.7 B from 2003 to 2010 makes it seem highly unlikely that spending in 2011 is only $1.4 B. Where are you getting this seemingly ridiculously low number from?”

I believe your numbers are correct. However, the initial Q that I commented on was about _climate research_ not spending related to climate warming. Sort of two different things.

I dont remember where I got that number, some google search, but it seems real enuf. The total NSF budget request for 2013 is only a little over 7 billion, and, I don’t know, maybe 1/20 or 1/10 of that number might go to climate, so that would be a portion. And then there is NASA and Energy, I dont know what their budgets are, I think smaller, but it might add up to about a billion or so.

@- MikeP
” if you consider the climate over the last 7000 years to be stable then you must have swallowed a hockey stick… :)”

No just perused the Antartic ice cores.
have a look at the climate varience in previous interstadels.
=========================
You have swallowed more than one hockey stick. For the NH, you refer to Anarctic cores. Wrong place. The Greeland ice cores have excellent resolution for the Holocene and attests very well to Holocene climate variability. Ice core records from Anarctica of previous interstadials are doubly irrevelant and you were in error to refer to them.

Yes Gail, *that one* makes me smile. A wonderful link and a perfect illustration for ‘pick a point to prove a point’. There was some banter back and forth at the top of this thread discussing the trend in graphs, one starting at 1998 and the other starting in the early ’90’s. My point is simple, actually and probably too obvious to make, but it seems we get away from it anyway > Graph me all you want – up, down, flat – but what part is anthropogenic, and what part is not? That’s the pea under the shell that we have to keep an eye on through all the climate science magic and stories we are subjected to.

Wrong, sea level rise may pause and accelerate along with ENSO but archeological and eclipse records confirm that sea level was stable and trendless for thousands of years until the recent warming.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Nope, wrong on both counts:

Also the Arctic was WARMER earlier in the Holocene then now. We are at the tail end of the Holocene and in general cooling towards the next low point in the Ice Age Cycles. Not even warmists disagree with that.

Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….

…Solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ca 11 ka ago and has been decreasing since then, primarily in response to the precession of the equinoxes. The extra energy elevated early Holocene summer temperatures throughout the Arctic 1-3° C above 20th century averages, enough to completely melt many small glaciers throughout the Arctic, although the Greenland Ice Sheet was only slightly smaller than at present… As summer solar energy decreased in the second half of the Holocene, glaciers reestablished or advanced, sea ice expanded, and the flow of warm Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean diminished. Late Holocene cooling reached its nadir during the Little Ice Age (about 1250-1850 AD), when sun-blocking volcanic eruptions and perhaps other causes added to the orbital cooling, allowing most Arctic glaciers to reach their maximum Holocene extent…”

We present a sea-ice record from northern Greenland covering the past 10,000 years. Multiyear sea ice reached a minimum between ~8500 and 6000 years ago, when the limit of year-round sea ice at the coast of Greenland was located ~1000 kilometers to the north of its present position. The subsequent increase in multiyear sea ice culminated during the past 2500 years and is linked to an increase in ice export from the western Arctic and higher variability of ice-drift routes….

Abstract
The collected documentary records of the cultivation of citrus trees and Boehmeria nivea (a perennial herb) have been used to produce distribution maps of these plants for the eighth, twelfth and thirteenth centuries A.D. The northern boundary of citrus and Boehmeria nivea cultivation in the thirteenth century lay to the north of the modern distribution. During the last 1000 years, the thirteenth-century boundary was the northernmost. This indicates that this was the warmest time in that period. On the basis of knowledge of the climatic conditions required for planting these species, it can be estimated that the annual mean temperature in south Henan Province in the thirteenth century was 0.9–1.0°C higher than at present. A new set of data for the latest snowfall date in Hangzhou from A.D. 1131 to 1264 indicates that this cannot be considered a cold period, as previously believed. http://www.springerlink.com/content/gh98230822m7g01l/

And even the EPA is showing the SST have leveled and not much higher than they were in the 1930’s Graph

Plants in the USA show that the temperatures in the 1990’s were cooler that in 1900. Bottom Graph

Once you get away from the computer models and look at geology and botany you can see we are heading towards cooling.

Of special note is MIS-19 an extreme interglacial, occurring at an eccentricity minimum just like MIS-11 was and MIS-1 presently is. As that interglacial ended

…
I prefer to avoid drama, Human city based civilisation emerged during the vetry stable climate of the Holocene over the last ~7000 years. Most of our agricultural systems are dependent on that climate stability, when it becomes more varied (hotter or colder) civilisations collapse.
I am unconvinced that modern technocratic civilisations are any more resilient than Roman, Mayan Aztec, Anasazi, Chan, Cambodian or any of the other major world civilisations that have failed in the past freom the stresses caused by climate variation.

As a geologist, I remain unconvinced there was “very stable climate of the Holocene over the last ~7,000 years” as you claim; indeed–your own statement that “other major world civilisations that have failed in the past from the stesses caused by climate variation” and then you list half a dozen examples proves it.

My gosh, izen, do you ever read what you write and then connect the dots? I don’t have to argue with you because you’re self-defeating. But logical thought isn’t the stong suit of those who have been brainwashed by the Warmista cult, is it?

Oh, and izen, those civilizations that you claimed to have failed because of “climate variation” (you listed the Roman, Mayan, Aztec, Anasazi, Chan, and Cambodian)–were any of those failures caused by anthropogenic CO2?

None, you say?

None?

Think about it.

Maybe, just maybe, anthropogenic CO2 isn’t what’s driving climate variation. Just maybe. Not this time, not last time, not the times before.

Is it just me, or is climate science the only branch of science that manages to consume tens of billions of dollars without providing humankind with a single byte of actionable intelligence? Science is meant to increase human knowledge, but climate science seems to have led only to an explosion in human *belief*. Have we learned anything useful about the climate that we didn’t know ten years ago?

Meanwhile real science is uncovering new wonders at a rate the interested reader couldn’t possibly keep up with.
_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_
trafamadore,
Sorry but, I am now confused by your post and response. The above seems to be the quote, in full, to which you are referring and is certainly the quote cited in your post and it refers to general concept of spending in the climate science discipline. In fact, no where in the post does the word “research” appear. I cannot find support for your NSF number specifically and, I am sure you would agree, that the NSF funding in no way represents all monies being funneled through tax-payer funded institutions to climate science related research, let alone the broader climate science campaign, for lack of a better word.

@- Gail Combs
“Late Holocene cooling reached its nadir during the Little Ice Age (about 1250-1850 AD)…
On the basis of knowledge of the climatic conditions required for planting these species, it can be estimated that the annual mean temperature in south Henan Province in the thirteenth century was 0.9–1.0°C higher than at present.”

So while the LIA was wiping out the Greenland Norse the Chinese were growing delicate herbs further north than at present.

Congratulations.
You have just presented strong evidence that the LIA was NOT globally synchronous and doesn’t represent a global cooling from which we are ‘naturally warming’.

@- RockyRoad
“As a geologist, I remain unconvinced there was “very stable climate of the Holocene over the last ~7,000 years” as you claim; indeed–your own statement that “other major world civilisations that have failed in the past from the stesses caused by climate variation” and then you list half a dozen examples proves it.”

I would suggest it is a matter of degree…
Civilisation arose when local conditions where benign, and often seems to fail when climate change stresses the agricultural infrastructure.
However I am open to argument on the causes of the failure of civilisations, I think Taintor is probably closer to the reality than Diarmond.

As for the contrast between the Holocene and past global climates; have you ever considered why genetically modern humans remained hunter-gatherers for over fifty thousand years through several glacial cycles and have only developed agriculture and city based societies in the last few thousand…?
Even if glacial advances and sea level rise had obliterated archeological evidence for earlier civilisation the lack of it is confirmed by the absence of any pollen distribution or genetic change in domesticated crops and animals until the Holocene.

@-John Finn
“Teasing out the CO2 contribution to warming is nigh on impossible but, after playing around with the available data (all datasets), I’m inclined to go with the Ridley estimate of around 1 deg (perhaps 1.5 deg) warming for 2xCO2.”

I am sorry but I see no reason to find the agreement between you and Matt Ridley as more compelling than the slightly higher (2.5degC) sensitivity than Baysian analysis derives from the work of thousands of scientists over the last 100 years.

Could you provide a link to the “thousands of scientists over the past 100 years” who have used Bayesian (not ‘Baysian’) analysis to derive a sensitivity greater than 2.5 deg. I know Hargreaves and Annan used a Bayesian approach but I’m not sure of Annan’s expertise in IR Spectroscopy or for that matter of the many other ‘scientists’ who have provided similar estimates. Jack Barrett, on the other hand, who has a proven record of many, many years in IR spectroscopy reckons the response to a doubling of CO2 is ~1.2 deg C. Richard Lindzen was a climate scientist a long, long time before climate science became trendy also estimates climate sensitivity at around 1 deg per 2xCO2.

Current observations support these lower estimates of sensitivity. I understand you prefer the more spectacular model results but it’s just not happening. Also this ……….

You don’t appear to understand the term ‘relative humidity’. It’s perfectly possible for humidity to rise but for relative humidity to fall. The models predict constant relative humidity. Dessler (your link) might well argue that humidity has risen (slightly) but a study that he co-authored in 2004 showed that the increase in humidity was nothing like that predicted by the models.

Relative humidity as the term suggests is the water vapor content of the atmosphere RELATIVE to the temperature and pressure.
It is quite possible for the ABSOLUTE water vapor content of the atmosphere to increase by around 10% but the relative humidity to fall if the temperature has increased. For instance in the US 48 during last year the higher temperature would have resulted in a fall in relative humidity compared to 1998 even if the actual amount of water vapor in the region had increased by a few percent.
I am unsure whether to attribute your focus on the relative humidity as an accidentally misleading omission.

@- John Finn
“Could you provide a link to the “thousands of scientists over the past 100 years” who have used Bayesian (not ‘Baysian’) analysis to derive a sensitivity greater than 2.5 deg.”

No, it was unjustified {and misspelt!} hyperbole and I apologise and withdraw it. {grin}
Althou I would argue that the history of what the climate sensitivity might be to various forcings does have a Bayesian pattern of refining an original guess… Arrhenius perhaps was first with around five degC.

1.5degC is right at the low end of present estimates and I suspect it would pose problems for the sensitivity required to generate interglacial periods. You could get into claims that climate sensitivity is variable, higher in some climate regimes than others. But trying to refine the sensitivity is arguing about the price after you have bought the item. The energy imbalance caused by rising CO2 is real, can be calculated and confirmed by direct observation.

Speculative feedbacks that may amplify or suppress the effect of that extra energy will only be triggered by the impact of that change in energy flow. While the impact on the average global temperature may be uncertain as the recent changes in the jet stream stability with moving convergence zones indicate, not all impacts are directly temperature related.

Whether those impacts are significantly damaging to human civilisation depends far more on the resilience of our present culture than a few percent difference on climate sensitivity. I find it odd that so much effort goes into the arcane details when the major parameter, and the one society has more direct control of, is how robust civilisation is in the face of any environmental global impact from any cause.

izen says:
January 16, 2013 at 1:03 pm
…. It is quite possible for the ABSOLUTE water vapor content of the atmosphere to increase by around 10% but the relative humidity to fall if the temperature has increased…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
However we first have to KNOW what the temperature is and with all the mucking around with the temperatures no one can tell at least to the accuracy that Climate scientists are claiming.
Also if you there is the ‘error’

graph
….The title of this graph indicates this is the CRU computed sampling (measurement) error in C for 1969. Note how large these sampling errors are. They start at 0.5Â°C, which is the mark where any indication of global warming is just statistical noise and not reality. Most of the data is in the +/- 1Â°C range, which means any attempt to claim a global increase below this threshold is mathematically false….

Australian temperature records shoddy, inaccurate, unreliable. Surprise!
The BOM say their temperature records are high quality. An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 -95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years! These sloppy errors may have created an artificial warming trend. The BOM are issuing pronouncements of trends to two decimal places like this one in the BOM’s Annual Climate Summary 2011 of “0.52 °C above average” yet relying on patchy data that did not meet its own compliance standards around half the time. It’s doubtful they can justify one decimal place….

That is why I gave up and look at plants, AND INCLUDED THE GRAPH. They do not lie about their growing ranges. Aside for the decades of 1970 and 1910 the other decades were pretty darn close and overlapping in the Koppen climate boundaries as would be expected from the temperatures displayed in the 1987 graph before all the ‘adjusting’ was done to craft a graph showing a steady rise in temperature.

OH and it seems you do not know the difference between thirteenth from fourteenth

Abstract
…. On the basis of knowledge of the climatic conditions required for planting these species, it can be estimated that the annual mean temperature in south Henan Province in the thirteenth century was 0.9–1.0°C higher than at present. A new set of data for the latest snowfall date in Hangzhou from A.D. 1131 to 1264 indicates that this cannot be considered a cold period, as previously believed.http://www.springerlink.com/content/gh98230822m7g01l/

…One valley farm, excavated in 1976 and 1977, revealed just how desperate some of the Greenlanders had become. During a freezing winter, the farmers killed and ate their livestock, including a newborn calf and lamb, leaving the bones and hoofs on the ground. Even the deerhound, probably the companion of many a hunt, may have been slaughtered for food; one of its leg bones bore the knicks of a knifeblade. Similar remains were found on another farm, but if, like their masters, the animals were starving, their fatless meat would have offered little nourishment.

Whoever killed the animals was used to living in squalid conditions….
… Radiocarbon dating of their remains revealed that they died out suddenly when these conditions ceased to prevail around 1350, presumably when the structures were no longer inhabited. Some of the rooms had been used as latrines, possibly out of habit or because the occupants were reluctant to venture out into the searing cold. An ice core drilled from the island’s massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.…

So both pieces of evidence do show similar temperature around the same time.

I suggest you check your circuits, because you are getting wrong answers. You
spoke about temperature increase “since 1850”, and then stated:

“we have already had around 11 inches of sea level rise and the rate is increasing,”

Others have already pointed out that sea level rise has not been accelerating,
if anything, it has been decelerating. Even more to the point, take a look at the
NOAA graph which Billy Liar linked. That shows, even with a
charitable reading, a rise of 190 millimeters. Just so you don’t miss the point,
that’s 7.5 inches. NOT 11 inches. In fact, more than 30% less than your figure.
So, again, please check your circuits. Or simply repeat to yourself, “25.4 millimeters
equals one inch…25.4 millimeters equals once inch…”

smac says: ” In fact, no where in the post does the word “research” appear.”

I went back and read it too, you are correct. I was going off of Keyes’ statement, “Science is meant to increase human knowledge”; I took that to be research.

The exact numbers for climate science are only estimates because so many different funding agencies fund climate science, but the 1 billion/year number seems about right. For a back of a napkin calculation, I was thinking that there are maybe 5000-7000 scientists/students funded, so that would be about 150-200K per person, which still seems high, but some of their machines are a little spendy, and the uni’s extract overhead out of that, so seems about right (+/- 20%.)

(The students certainly dont get that!!)

So it would be 10s of billions per decade I guess.

For perspective, what did the Iraq war cost, 800 billion? What a deal…

I think you realize that the scientific community has an embarrassing internal problem in the climate area.

The scientific community has not been able to balance out a biased CAGW infestation of scientific mimics (aka psuedo-scientists) in the climate science area. So the interested citizens have gallantly stepped in to help maintain focus in on balancing out the bias of the CAGW scientific mimics. The interested citizens are doing a good job. Carry on.

The infestation includes scientific mimics like: Hansen, Gleick, Mann, Lewandowsky, Overpeck (AR5) and Steig . . . just to name a few.

I googled “susceptible to rumor than it is to fact” and “susceptibility to rumor and fact” and got several hits, many different. Was your prof’s name Dubois?

IanM.

Ian, I just do not remember it was so long ago. But the professor was not one of the authors, the paper was the only subject of an entire lecture because it was just such a fundamental human trait. It seems to me that the study was done primarily by the psychology school of some university in Illinois. Maybe, possibly, the University of Chicago……

You know the evidence is pouring in. 2013 may well be the hottest year on record.

Since we are only in the third week of January with 49 weeks to go I have to admire your prognostical abilities. But then I saw the weasel word ‘may’..

Shame.

Because otherwise I was going to inquire whether you took private contracts as a racing tipster. Could do with a bit of spare cash to pay my hugely inflated heating bills because of all the global warming induced cold weather we are forecast in UK over the next week or so.

smac says: ” In fact, no where in the post does the word “research” appear.”

I went back and read it too, you are correct. I was going off of Keyes’ statement, “Science is meant to increase human knowledge”; I took that to be research.

(The students certainly dont get that!!)

So it would be 10s of billions per decade I guess.

For perspective, what did the Iraq war cost, 800 billion? What a deal…

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Funding for technology research alone in 2010 was $5.5 B and that reflects only one revenue stream in one branch of the discipline. Of course, some amount gets pissed away en route to the actual project. Your calculation is analogous to saying that the salaries of CEOs and SVPs is reflective of the total cost of running said corporation. It isn’t even close. $10 B per year is reasonable based on your methodology and likely to be low. (When was the last time you saw a “back of the napkin” calculation underestimate the cost of something.) The Federal government reports alone put $10 B a year in play easily … and that is one level of multiple stream funding. Your numbers just are not close.

Not sure what the Iraq war reference adds but, makes me worry you are a moment away from invoking Godwin’s Law. A better point of discussion, for perspective, might be how much funding goes to research in how to curtail population growth through education. The “might” part is big though because any such discussion will degrade to religious stance much the same way climate debate does. Too bad there is so much circling of the wagons … leaves no room for rationale skepticism and the subsequent debate.

I must say, being new (more like re-newed) to this blog debate and having surveyed many, many sites, only the skeptic sites allow the opposite side a voice. I tried to engage conversation at many of the believer sites on this topic, posting links to government reports, etc (much more diligently than I have here) and none of my posts were ever left intact. Made for some comedy when a later reader would see a partial post and demand I produce a link to a government report or such which had, ironically, been parsed from my original post.

Lambert’s dark little corner of the internet is a smelly closet of a pub where disgruntled leftist can sit and sneer at the world.

And after a couple of days ‘discussion’ over there I can confirm everything he says. But I’d change it a bot to

‘sit there alone and sneer at the world like bitter introverted old men whose livelihood has disappeared, friends are deserting them and for whom death can’t come too soon’

It was quite the weirdest and nastiest bit of the climatosphere I have ever visited. Perhaps the strangest part is that they delude themselves that they are a ‘high-traffic’ and highly successful part of the debate.

Dr Watson says:
January 16, 2013 at 3:41 pm
“Give up guys. You know the evidence is pouring in. 2013 may well be the hottest year on record.
How are you going to clean up all that egg on your faces?”

If the CO2AGW theory were a correct description of reality one would expect exactly that. Anything less is another refutation of the CO2AGW theory. CO2AGW science needs accumulation of energy but nature doesn’t cooperate.

So I think we have a better chance of seeing another refutation of CO2AGW science by nature in 2013 than not.

“There ensued a silly little twitter war of words in which Lambert refused me room to reply in a blog post with diagrams – the comments space of his website does not fit diagrams — while a chorus of tweeters heaped abuse on my head. This is what passes for debate in climate science, or computer graphics departments, these days.”

How very true and sad, so typical climate science debate…

“Now look, fellers, you do this kind of thing for a living. I’m just a self-employed writer with no back-up team, no government grants, no taxpayer salary, no computer simulations, and absolutely no pretensions to being Nostradamus about anything. But it strikes me I did a far better job of predicting the climate back in 1993 than any of you! How could that be?”

Again a strike, Matt. It explains in a sentence the skeptic and warmist camps.

Will Nitschke says:
January 15, 2013 at 5:47 pmWith reference to this claim:
“All three of his scenarios were wildly higher than what actually happened, even though carbon dioxide emissions were HIGHER than in all three of his models.”
This is wrong. Actual CO2 levels best track scenario B. It is important to be accurate as a sceptic and there is no need to exaggerate anyway, as scenario B is not even close to what actually happened.
The scenarios were for emissions, and the emissions were higher.
The actual CO2 levels in the atmosphere were lower which is another fail.

I’ve now read Lambert’s posts at Deltoid along with Ridley’s post here and his comments at Deltoid. What an incredible waste of time all this represents. Ridley’s 1993 essay is not worth this kind of scrutiny. It is poorly reasoned, factually inaccurate, and deadly dull. Ridley should be more embarrassed by the content of the essay than by any particular statement therein. The smarter strategy would have been to ignore Lambert’s attack rather than inflicting a greater injury with the back and forth.

Also, Ridley needs to catch up with how things work on blogs. Bloggers are not journalists so he shouldn’t be puzzled that he wasn’t contacted before blogger Lambert posted to his blog. I’m sure Anthony Watts can confirm that this; I doubt that Watts contacts Michael Mann or James Hansen before commenting on things they’ve said or written.